It is probably enough to cite the most recent and obvious example of instrumentalized history: Vladimir Putin’s use of a highly stylized history to justify Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine. Finger-pointing is not necessary, though, especially when we have plenty of examples here in the United States of the cramped, mean, grotesque—if less breathtakingly evil—uses of history. The fabled “history wars” of the 1990s are still with us. Banning books that offer an unwelcome historical narration is back in vogue. A once marginal “incredulity toward metanarratives” has now metastasized into a mainstream endorsement of “alternative facts” about the recent past. And we cannot even figure out whether to narrate the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol as a violent insurrection or a legitimate expression of First Amendment rights.
Because the uses of history can so easily shade into abuses of them, it is tempting to turn to a text like Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1874 essay “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben” (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”) to help us diagnose our current predicaments and navigate a way out of them. Just a glance at Nietzsche’s tract on history will show why readers for more than a century have tried to repurpose it to help them distinguish the pernicious from the productive in considering the presentness of the past. Plus, it’s an open secret that reading Nietzsche is fun. For those who haven’t spent time in his company lately, try opening any volume and flipping through it at random, and see if you can do it without experiencing, as John Cowper Powys once put it, “the old fatal intoxication. This early essay on history is pretty exhilarating. In it, Nietzsche was finding his singular voice, one that still has the power to slip through an invisible wrinkle in time and make it seem as though he is speaking directly, even urgently, to us and our moment.
What Nietzsche might have liked his future readers to forget is that even self-described “untimely” philosophers are products of their history. Nietzsche’s essay on history is one of his easier texts to read, yet the hardest to understand, because he wrote it less as a meditation on history as such than as a pointed manifesto against a very specific target: the history-besotted culture of the German Empire. While there is never a bad time to read Nietzsche’s evocative, provocative, and often hilarious “thoughts out of season,” we do well to remember that he was not writing to us. His agon was with his German contemporaries, who were occasionally repulsed by his genius, but more often simply unimpressed by it.